Accordéon

1) "I am inside the Ministry. Everything I say is my confession, which I give of my own volition."

2) "Today the winners are inheriting their history as the losers are crushed by their own, struggling to cope by selling contraband cigarettes. Joseph Légaré is standing in his studio, imagining a wilderness and painting 'The Martyrdom of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant.' The Huron have the two fathers tied naked to stakes and are boiling water with which to scald their flesh, while the sky soars above them and the trees stand indifferent. The buildings downtown stand indifferent as the Arab boy is pinned to the floor of the metro by security officers. Two Québécois students hover and record the incident on their phones. They shout that the officers will become stars on YouTube. A beaver is trapped. People in France will wear its fur around their shoulders and heads, and wealthy traders will dig wine cellars under the soil of the Old Port. All of this happens at once, as night falls and the students march. In defiance, one hundred thousand pots are struck by spoons, and the flying canoe materializes on the churning water of the St-Laurent, right under the iron bridge. A woman sits alone in the middle of the canoe. She plugs a violin into a string of effects pedals. The pedals blink in the darkened hull. As she plays, her notes distort, multiply, reverberate, bounce off the water and push the canoe upward. The water drips and lengthens into strings and those translucent strings are played by the moonlight and the wind. The canoe rises higher, in a slow spiral with its bow tilted upward, and the strings tremble as the canoe hovers over the moon."

3) "Do you understand me when I say that this is a fictional city in which there is no concrete present moment, but rather a dreamlike limbo in which the infrastructure does not know whether to straighten and stand or tumble into the St-Lawrence and sink to the bottom? This city is a canoe."

4) "I don’t know what you think of me. You look at me across the restaurant, across the aisle on the bus, across the street. You always look at me across something. A crossing needs to be made. A gaze needs to be met, but people are driving cars and trafficking text messages between us. Entire neighbourhoods are simultaneously flourishing and falling into dereliction between us, as we stare and wonder what the other is thinking."

5) "New immigrants are always arriving and finding themselves unemployed in a Tim Hortons next to a metro. The same conversations are being repeated in cafés over espressos and croissants, the same gestures are being made with different hands, yet the cigarettes are gone. In this café the same music is playing on different speakers. The prices have gone up. The same books are taught to new students each year. The same dumpling is made (with only the subtlest, most delicious variation) every minute of every day between 10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. in Chinatown. The same bellies are getting fat while the same ones starve, the trauma is being repeated, ingrained, the reel is still playing the same cowboys and Indians film on loop in the minds of young boys, the contraband cigarettes are still being sold on the reserves, the same arms are being sold overseas to insurgent groups in Syria and Afghanistan, the same faceless rich war profiteers are still endowing literary prizes and fulfilling philanthropic duties, and the same conventional ambitions are still driving the university students as the same language is spoken in new voices that resemble old voices, and the same images are recycled as evidence, as the same wino passes out on the shore of the St-Lawrence river hoping to drown himself but forgetting to do so after he drinks the same bomb-shaped bottle of 13.5 percent Labatt that he drank yesterday and the day before and the identical day before."

6) "If the glistening croissant from the earlier passage were removed to a suburb of Ottawa, it would not perform the same role as it does in Montréal. It would simply be a weightless croissant. But in Montréal it is a golden inheritance that counterbalances the weight of colonial conquest, despair, and dejection."

7) "Everyone comes to themselves suddenly, looks around and realizes they have all landed on wood, with a strange wet slapping sound echoing around them, and they all stand up, and they peer out over the rim of the canoe at the St-Lawrence river, the river foaming and lapping, with the moonlight slithering atop it, and the bridge in the distance, and the canoe creaks and groans as it lifts up over the river, and the people in the canoe look to the stern and see that a tall, muscled Panis man, with iron cuffs around his wrists and iron cuffs around his ankles, is paddling the canoe. To the front, a bois d’ébène of equal size and strength, equally rugged, and also with chains and cuffs around his hands and feet, is paddling. They paddle the canoe up off the river, and as they do they chat in a language that is unfamiliar to everyone. As the slave-pilots chat, they paddle up the sky toward the moon. The men paddle with long smooth inexhaustible strokes, digging their paddles deep into the air. The canoe slides silently along. It is full of small people who perform all of the functions of life in the city: bank tellers, postal workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and janitors and bus drivers, and they stare out the canoe at the river and the night. As the canoe approaches the moon they look out over the water and see Africa in the distance, the Caribbean and South America floating far below, India and China glittering to the far east, Lebanon and Syria outlined against the night, and the people who come from those places stare in awe and cry silently. As they do, the two mighty paddlers puff and pass a fat spliff, and as the ash flakes off the burning end, it crumbles into snow and dusts the streets of Montréal far below."

8) "This is the main aim of the Ministry: to determine which realities our society performs. This is the conspiracy. This is why the flying canoe is so important. The canoe recognizes one reality alone: